1999-10-08 04:00:00 PDT BERKELEY -- Stalin's Communist regime had the bomb. An ill-prepared U.S. Army was bogged down in Korea in a war nobody expected. Mushroom clouds bloomed over the Nevada desert. Air and missile crews practiced for a nuclear shootout, the newspapers were baying for reds, and the Rosenbergs were sentenced to death for passing atomic secrets to the Soviets.

At the onset of the Cold War about a half-century ago, a nation's paranoia seeped into the rarefied atmosphere of the University of California. There, it combined with institutional power politics, and the resulting storm clouded a pinnacle of academia.

In 1949, the Board of Regents imposed a loyalty oath on all university employees, demanding that they disavow all revolutionary ties as a condition of the year-to-year employment contracts the university then issued. In 1950, the regents fired 31 professors who refused to sign, even though the purged academicians were guilty of nothing but standing up for the principle of an independent faculty. But in 1952, the state Supreme Court struck down the loyalty oath and ordered the professors reinstated.

"A series of disagreements all came together and were glued together by the loyalty oath," said Clark Kerr, a university president emeritus who as a junior faculty member became a champion of the "non-signers."

Kerr and others who risked their careers when they opposed thought control in 1949 are gathering on the Berkeley campus this week to recount the strange episode of the loyalty oath, a chapter that resonates today with polygraph tests being considered as a condition of employment at the university-run Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Along with historians and past and present university administrators, this week's symposium participants are asking how it happened that an institution that symbolized academic freedom managed to blight the standard. The program, part of the UC History Project, continues today at 1 p.m. at Boalt Hall's Booth Auditorium.

To Kerr, the answer lies in the interplay of Cold War hysteria, university politics and the mind and management style of Robert Sproul.

The brilliantly political Sproul rose from no academic background to become president of the UC system in 1930. With his basso voice and profuse extroversion, the former Cal band drum major made the university among the world's largest and most prestigious.

Kerr, who is devoting a chapter to the loyalty oath in his forthcoming memoirs, said the episode was less about imagined fears of Stalin's influence on American intellectuals -- card-carrying Communists had little sway at the university -- than about a melding of the era's general paranoia with Los Angeles-Berkeley contentiousness over how university resources were spread out. And the crisis that had begun seemingly innocuously with the request for the contract-related oath was aggravated by a split between liberal and conservative regents.

"The oath was partly an issue in its own right, but anti-communist hysteria was a weapon used for other purposes, like getting more for UCLA," Kerr said yesterday in an interview before joining in a panel discussion with fellow emeritus university presidents David Saxon and David Gardner.

Sproul was a powerful and respected leader who committed one of the greatest mistakes in the history of the university, Kerr said.

"It was looked on as a regents' oath, but he proposed it and did so without consulting" faculty representatives, Kerr said. "He was opposed to communism, but he was also very interested in preserving his authority as president."

Kerr was teaching in an obscure department -- industrial relations -- when he was asked to serve on a committee that was struggling to find a compromise between the administration and the faculty. He became an advocate for the non-signers as he grew to realize that the administration was taking a foolish position that threatened to rid the university not of subversives but of its most independent minds.

Kerr said that although the regents never apologized, they and Sproul came to regret their stance -- and showed as much by instituting continuous tenure and making up for pay the non-signers lost during the crisis. The protesters were not blacklisted in their professions and returned to posts at the university or moved elsewhere in academia.

The roots of the debacle go back as far as the Russian Revolution of 1917, an event observed by a young J. Edgar Hoover, historian Ellen Schrecker told the forum yesterday. Later, as FBI director, Hoover directed a network of communist hunters in institutions throughout the nation. State legislatures and public universities came to mirror the moralistic fervor with anti-communist oaths and investigations that began blandly but developed into witch hunts.

And while such heavy-handed tactics are unlikely to be repeated, Schrecker warned that academic freedom faces a new danger from the constraints put on it by a growing dependency on corporate support.

For Saxon, a UCLA physicist who refused to sign the oath, the lesson of academia's greatest crisis of the Cold War comes down to a truth that the well-intentioned Sproul ignored at his peril: "The faculty of a great university is composed of men and women who think otherwise."